GUEST OPINION: It's time for Congress to create sensible solutions to gun violence

Politicians, like most humans attempt to seek pleasure and avoid pain.

Those in Congress must be made to fear the wrath of the American voter more than they fear the National Rifle Association.

Americans are fed up with senseless gun violence. Congress and the president have grown far too comfortable protecting the status quo. The status quo is killing our children and is rotting the moral fabric of this country from the inside out.

I remember some of my first lessons when I entered the world of politics.

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Money is the mother's milk of politics. Without resources to put your message out, regardless of how good your message is, you are unlikely to be elected. You must create a powerful constituency for change or the status quo prevail.

Once you have the votes, shut up and call the question.

There needs to be an intense, well-funded campaign to get the votes in Congress to help stop the gun madness.

Thoughtful Americans must organize and advocate for a balanced approach to gun violence in America including. At a minimum, they must:

-- Make create mental health services for people with serious mental illness available and affordable.

-- Address the culture of violence perpetuated by the video and entertainment industry. Video games are corrosive to a healthy and stable society.

Hurrah for former U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and her husband Mark Kelly for stepping up and creating the Americans for Responsible Solutions (www.americansforresponsiblesolutions.org) to focus on ways to reduce gun violence.

"This may be a tipping point," said Kelly, a retired Gulf War veteran, Navy pilot and NASA space shuttle commander. "We can't tolerate 20 children and their teachers being murdered in their school. I own a handgun, and I think everybody has the right to own a gun to protect themselves in their homes," but I don't believe you need assault weapons to protect yourself."

This is just the type of counterweight needed to the NRA.

Giffords and Kelly will help keep the issue in the forefront of the voters' minds. Now they need your contribution to help stop this senseless gun violence.

When the rate of children killed by guns in the United States is 19.5 times higher than similarly high-income countries in the world, there is a problem.

Passing sensible laws that keeps these weapons of modern war off our streets and out of the hands of deranged people is not a violation of the Second Amendment and does not interfere with the rights of any legitimate gun owner.

Anything less is inadequate, window-dressing that allows our children and innocents to be continuously slaughtered.

While President Obama vows to push for immediate and concrete gun-control proposals to prevent such carnage, he must convince a majority of Congress to come along. We the people need to let Congress know we want action.

The time is now for America's sensible center to rise up with the indignation, pain and sorrow we felt when hearing that 20, 6- to-7-year-olds were slaughtered in the sanctity of school.

The Rolling Stones got it right when they sang in the mid 1960's "Sympathy For the Devil": "We shouted out who killed the Kennedy's when after all it was you and me."

Doing nothing can no longer be tolerated. If we allow the status quo to stand, blood will be on our collective hands when the next mass killing occurs.

Children are being gunned down in America. Killings happen daily on urban streets and mass murders happened in Columbine, Col., at a Sikh temple in Wisconsin, in Aurora, Col., at Virginia Tech and at a fortified Army base in Fort Hood, Texas. Now it happened in in Newtown, Conn.

Regardless of whether you are pro-gun or anti-gun, your politics lean right or left, we need to set our personal, selfish perspectives aside and come up with real solutions that will help prevent senseless killings from becoming ingrained more than they already have as the norm in America.

Obama and Congress must seriously address this moral cancer in our midst. The politician who blocks sensible reforms should fear the American voter come the next election.

Let's demand a stop to the finger-pointing and come together as Americans to solve the problem of gun violence.

Surely the lost souls of Newtown and other innocents gunned down in senseless violence will be watching.

Tom Watkins served Michigan as state mental health director and state superintendent of schools. He can be reached at tdwatkins88gmail.com.